Behind the deal to create the world’s largest airline is a former Texas criminal prosecutor who may never have worked for an airline had his neighbor across the street not been in the business.

Delta Air Lines Chief Executive Richard Anderson — widely praised as a skilled negotiator and problem solver but also capable of snap judgments, some say — is working the case of his life. The deal he shapes, folding Northwest Airlines into its brawnier rival, Atlanta-based Delta, could unleash the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. commercial aviation since the industry was deregulated three decades ago.

Can he pull off his “perfect fit” airline strategy? If anyone can, Anderson can, said his friend Michael E. Levine, a former Northwest executive vice president who now teaches at New York University’s School of Law.

“Being a senior airline executive,” said Levine, who was chief executive at startup New York Air in the early 1980s, “is like playing three-dimensional chess on a 30-second time clock.”

By most accounts, Anderson, 52, does that well. Even detractors agree. Rep. Jim Oberstar, the influential transportation committee chairman who has vowed to fight the merger, called Anderson a “brilliant” tactician. He also has called the merger “probably the worst development in aviation history.”

“He’ll work furiously to put this together and make it work,” Oberstar said. “But I don’t wish him well. I don’t want it to happen.”

COUNTY PROSECUTOR

In the 1980s, Anderson was prosecuting drunken drivers and suspected killers for Harris County, Texas. He had put himself through South Texas College of Law at night while caring for his younger siblings after his mother and father died. He and his wife, Susan, also a lawyer, were starting a family.

Had their neighbor been someone else, the Northwest-Delta picture might look very different today. But Ben Hirst, legal counsel for Houston-based Continental Airlines at the time, happened to live across the street.

“Everyone would sit outside on lawn chairs in the evening,” Hirst recalled of meeting Anderson.

Hirst said his neighbor’s intelligence and down-to-earth manner impressed him right away. Anderson was always reading an interesting history book, he said. He recalled asking Anderson what it was like trying DUIs: “He said, ‘Well, the first thing you have to do is convince the jury that it’s against the law.’ ”

In 1987, Hirst’s employer Continental was just out of bankruptcy, and Hirst was facing a load of litigation. He needed a tough attorney more than a corporate lawyer, someone who could quickly drill into the essence of a matter and argue it. Like a trial lawyer. Hirst recruited Anderson.

When Hirst headed north in 1990 to be general counsel for Northwest Airlines, he immediately tapped Anderson to join him. So started a stream of talent out of Continental to Northwest, with many of the hires associated with Hirst.

Hirst would recruit Doug Steenland a year later from a Washington, D.C., law firm, seeking to balance out Anderson’s litigation skills. Steenland, now Northwest’s CEO, was a transaction guy. Hirst called them “bookends in terms of legal skills.”

RISE AT NORTHWEST

Anderson was soon put in charge of labor relations and government affairs at Northwest. He negotiated — then renegotiated — the nearly $800 million financial-aid package the state gave Northwest to help save it from bankruptcy. He shrank a maintenance-base project in northern Minnesota.

For Oberstar, the compromise he and Anderson forged at a marathon meeting at the state Capitol over pizza in 1994 meant giving up an engine-repair plant that had promised as many as 500 jobs in Hibbing.

“We started out to announce an agreement,” Oberstar said at the time. “And we wound up having a negotiation.”

In 1997, Northwest was struggling with maintenance logjams, flight cancellations and delays — partly caused by scattered worker slowdowns. CEO John Dasburg needed it fixed fast. Hirst recommended Anderson because of his problem-solving skills, though he had no airline operations experience. Anderson had the planes running on time in less than six months, Hirst said.

Continuing his ascent, Anderson oversaw the creation of Northwest’s Midfield Terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the airline’s lucrative hub that made its debut in 2002, managing to retain complete Northwest control over the facility.

A STRATEGIST, BUT SNAP JUDGMENTS

Anderson’s reputation was set: a cunning strategist and tough but straightforward negotiator who maintains the aura of a regular guy.

The traits earned him points with Northwest’s labor unions.

“He had integrity. He’d tell you the way it was,” said Marv Sandrin, head of the local machinists union in the mid-1990s.

He’s also a risk-taker, Levine and others say, though you wouldn’t know it from his book-reading personal life.

One former colleague, who asked not to be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak for the company, said Anderson, a fierce competitor, can make “f—- ’em” snap judgments. What the decisions didn’t cost Northwest in dollars they exacted in some ill will, he said.

When little charter airline Sun Country began regularly scheduled flights from Northwest’s fortress hub in the Twin Cities, Anderson decided to freeze it out, the former colleague said, even declaring that Northwest wouldn’t sell it spare parts or fuel, as is tradition among airlines. One New York Times account about the David-and-Goliath battle quoted a Brainerd pastor lamenting that Northwest was trying to run Sun Country out of business.

In what some perceive as another misstep, Anderson went after Northwest’s own employee-owned credit union. The airline sued it in 2003 for using Northwest’s trademarks and logos, after charging the credit union $6 million in royalty payments. The credit union has since changed its name. The case was resolved out of court, a spokesman for the credit union said.

Those are mere bumps in the scheme of industry turbulence during Anderson’s tenure as Northwest CEO from 2001 to 2004. He was steering the airline through one of the industry’s stormiest periods. The big airlines were being buffeted by a recession, the rise of discount carriers and aftershocks from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Anderson slashed costs from the moment he took the captain’s seat. Northwest eliminated more than 17,000 jobs while Anderson was CEO and cut nonlabor expenses by more than $1 billion a year. And he continued arm-wrestling with Northwest unions to cut $1 billion more in wages and labor costs.

JUMP TO UNITEDHEALTH

In 2004, with Northwest in the heat of negotiating pay cuts with pilots and the airline losing nearly $1.4 million a day, Anderson abruptly ended his 14-year career at Northwest. He departed for a high-salary job at Minnetonka health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group that held the promise of a lucrative stock payoff at a time when Northwest stock was dead in the water. An executive vice president, Anderson headed up a unit providing noninsurance services to other health care organizations.

Andy Slavitt, now head of UnitedHealth subsidiary Ingenix, praised his former boss as modest and demanding. Slavitt recalled a barbecue at Anderson’s house in Eden Prairie that everyone assumed would be a typical catered corporate affair. When they arrived, they found Anderson outside working a grill, flipping burgers.

The Andersons, who now live in the Garden Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, still own two homes in Minnesota — a $2 million home they built on Lake Calhoun and a house on Lake Minnetonka. Their son and daughter are in college. Anderson’s new car: a Volkswagen Jetta.

Anderson was still working at UnitedHealth last year, as it recovered from a stock-option backdating scandal, when he got back into the airline industry, joining Delta’s board of directors. The board position naturally stoked speculation about Northwest and rival Delta merging — rumors that had whirled before when the two airlines filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on the same day in the same Manhattan court in 2005.

Five months after joining Delta’s board early last year, Anderson departed UnitedHealth to take the controls at Delta. Anderson, in a recent interview, said he turned down the offer at first. He reconsidered after a day at UnitedHealth hunkered down with actuaries struggling through a snafu with Medicare Part D drug pricing.

“I went home to Sue and I said, ‘I just don’t know …’ ” Anderson said.

WAS MERGER PREARRANGED?

Anderson’s moves, perceived as calculating by some, created the impression that the Delta-Northwest merger had been arranged long before Anderson went to Atlanta.

“It appears almost deliberate,” said Northwest flight attendant Danny Campbell, former president of Northwest’s flight attendants union. “He sort of bowed out of Northwest before we went into bankruptcy, so none of that mud sticks to him. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure it out.”

Northwest’s powerful pilots union refused to discuss Anderson. The pilots are angry that management proceeded with the merger without resolving a seniority-list dispute between the two airlines’ groups of pilots. To make matters worse, Delta just negotiated a deal with its pilots to give them an equity stake in the new company plus a pay raise. There was no such deal for Northwest pilots.

Mark McClain, a veteran Northwest pilot in Detroit who was chairman of Northwest’s pilots union during Anderson’s difficult tenure as CEO, considers Anderson generally honest and straightforward. But there’s a sense of betrayal now, he said.

“I think that he’s willing to put aside those pretty good personal qualities in pursuit of the goal, whatever that might be,” said McClain, who is no longer a union officer. “Northwest Airlines helped make Richard Anderson who he is today. I would like to think that would come into play.”

Anderson disputes the notion that he bolted when the going got tough. The job at UnitedHealth was just too good an opportunity to pass up, he said. And Delta simply made sense because he missed the airline business. UnitedHealth already was past the stock scandal, he said. Anderson insists the Delta-Northwest merger wasn’t created until this year.

And he’ll succeed with the merger, he said, “because I’m good at getting good people engaged to do the work.”

A THOUGHT-OUT PLAN

A merger was certainly on the list of Anderson’s possible chess moves, said Levine, his former Northwest colleague. After all, Northwest merging with another carrier had been the talk since the early 1990s, and Continental Airlines and Delta always were at the top of the list of possible partners. But Levine insisted that Anderson didn’t arrive at Delta with a single-minded merger plan.

“I think he went to Delta and made a very careful strategic assessment and then decided it was the best idea,” Levine said.

Not everyone agrees. The merger plan has been roundly criticized in the early going, with wary investors sending the stocks of both carriers down sharply. Wall Street expected more cost savings, and sooner. The $1 billion-a-year “synergy” savings won’t happen until 2012.

Even Levine is skeptical. Northwest’s former executive vice president of marketing and international, Levine forged the airline’s pioneering alliances with Continental and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. He prefers alliances to complicated, risky mergers.

“I think there are economies and advantages in mergers that are riskier to get,” Levine said. “The low-hanging fruit comes from alliances. How far up the tree are you willing to climb?”

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